Reviews

If Bono's story doesn't end up as a Lifetime TV movie, it will at least merit an episode of E! Hollywood True Story. The lesbian daughter of Sonny and Cher follows up her excellent coming out guide, Family Outing (1998), with a slim, honest memoir covering her turbulent life in the years between 1988 and '93. Bono and her girlfriend, Rachel, formed a band, hoping that performing together would revitalize their waning relationship but things didn't work out that way. The Star tabloid outed Bono shortly after she and Rachel signed a record deal with Geffen Records. The two novices stayed closeted while they tried to record a CD and deal with Rachel's alcoholism and the fact that Bono had fallen in love with Joan, a beautiful, 40-something friend of the family who had just been diagnosed with cancer. Bono's fear of confrontation drags out the misery for this love triangle (and the reader) during the book's middle section, which sometimes plays like an overwrought episode of MTV's Real World. Oddly, the recording-studio scenes lack passion, and with no discussion of lyrics or orchestrations, Bono seems like an outsider in her own musical group; it's hard for the reader to feel much empathy when their single tanks. The last half of the book, when Bono commits to Joan just as her health begins to deteriorate, packs an emotional punch with brutally frank depictions of loving and living with a person with a terminal illness. Bono spares no one, including herself, with a wrenching and exhausting finish. Agent, Loretta Barrett. (June) Forecast: Her mother is Cher, she's an out lesbian and the book is a Hollywood tale of drugs, death and girl-on-girl action yes, we'd say the book will get a lot of media attention. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.